Attacking Serbs Is Easy, Finding Right Target Is Hard

War in Bosnia-Herzegovina

Without Careful Planning, Military Action By The West Could Endanger Civilians, U.n. Troops And Journalists.

May 2, 1993|By Washington Post

SARAJEVO, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA — If the West attacks Serb units in Bosnia, the 7,400 U.N. troops and the estimated 1,000 aid officials and journalists here are expected to become targets. Already 35 U.N. soldiers, two aid workers and about a dozen journalists have been killed since the operation began last year.

''If you want a human shield, I can't think of a better one than this one,'' said a senior British officer.

Last week, Bosnian Serb units threatened to shell British forces based in the central Bosnian city of Vitez if Western forces launched any type of attack against Serbs anywhere, said British army Maj. Brian Watters.

His commander, Lt. Col. Robert Stewart, was called to a meeting with the local Serb commander whose sole purpose was to remind the Briton that his battalion was well within range of Serb howitzers that dominate nearby hills.

Sarajevo airport, the headquarters of a French battalion and scores of other U.N. forces, is a virtual free-fire zone and has no underground shelters. Col. Michel Poulet, the French commander there, said Serb, Muslim and Croat guns that surround the airport could reduce the facility to rubble in a matter of hours.

The question the men on the ground ask, however, is what action would work the best.

If the attack is too strong, they say, it risks a senseless slaughter of U.N. personnel and civilians. Hostages could be taken, and Serbs could intensify or renew their shelling of civilian Muslim populations in Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Bihac, Gorazde and elsewhere. Tony Land, chief of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees office in Sarajevo, said that if large-scale air attacks are launched, aid workers would be pulled out.

If the Western response is too weak, the Serbs might ignore it and continue their push in eastern Bosnia to enlarge the Serb-controlled corridors connecting Serbia with Serb-held territory in Bosnia and Croatia.

One seemingly unavoidable problem, U.N. officers say, is that no matter how the West responds, if it does so with force, the action will end up killing civilians.

Along the road overlooking Sarajevo, for example, Serb tank and artillery positions nestle next to clusters of houses where farmers plow hillside fields and children play. Even with ''smart bombs'' these civilians are in danger, a fact that 23-year-old Serb tank gunner Branko Milanovic recognizes with a grin.

''Kill me and you kill harmless people, too,'' he said, sitting next to a reinforced bunker packed with tank shells that overlooks a two-story house.

Milanovic, a native of Sarajevo, also had something to say about the concept of rolling back what is widely felt to be Serb aggression.

''We are not an occupying army,'' he said. ''We live here. Where are you going to roll us back to? If it comes to real war, we will go to the hills.''

Milanovic's plan for guerrilla warfare exposes another problem with those in the West who advocate bombing supply routes connecting Bosnian Serbs to their patrons in Serbia. Air strikes on supply lines would be like bombing the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam War, according to Milos Vasic, military analyst at the weekly Vreme magazine, published in Belgrade. Serb forces in Bosnia have stockpiled too much weaponry already, he wrote in this week's issue, for such attacks to have any effect.

U.N. officers here appear to fear most the one option that would entail doing the least - rearming Muslim forces. U.N. officers here say it would be a recipe for massacres.

''Maybe that was a way out 10 months ago or even six months ago, when the war was relatively young,'' said a senior French officer. ''But there is so much hate here that the Muslims would turn around and do the same things to the Serbs and the Croats that have been done to them. Tit for tat, it would become. And we would be the ones cleaning up the corpses.''

Of all the options, U.N. and most Bosnian Muslim officials seem to back an expansion of demilitarized zones such as the one established around the besieged Muslim town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia.

In that event, the U.N. Security Council would issue ultimatums to surrounding forces to withdraw from territory to allow aid in. Besieged forces would have to be persuaded not to take advantage of the withdrawal to capture lost ground or launch attacks.

U.S. air power could then be brought to bear on specific positions that ignored the ultimatum, thereby potentially limiting the effect of any backlash.